Hip-hop for change: No honor in honor crimes

Palestinian hip-hop group DAM team up with UN Women to create a video that they hope will change hearts and minds.

Dam Palestinian rap 370.
(photo credit: Courtesy of UN Women and DAM)

Palestinian musicians, local groups combating violence against women, and UN
Women on Tuesday launched an unprecedented music video in Ramallah and in Haifa
as part of a campaign to fight against the persistence of so-called “honor
crimes.”

DAM, a popular Palestinian hip-hop group whose three members are
originally from Lod, and Amal Murkus, an internationally renowned soloist who
comes from Kfar Yasif in the Galilee, teamed up to create a riveting video that
they hope will not just go viral, but will change hearts and minds.

The
song, “If I could go back in time,” appears to be the first to take on the taboo
of honor killings – a term that refers to the murder of a woman at the hands of
a close family member, usually because she is suspected of infidelity, having
pre-marital relations, or defying the family’s choice of marriage
partner.

The video, which was produced with UN funding, is a
state-of-the-art production with eye-catching effects and powerful lyrics about
the life and death of one young woman. Unpredictably, the video starts with a
beautiful woman at the end of her life – an image of her with a bullet in
forehead which then moved out and backwards. The viewer watches the awful
struggle with the brothers who had stuffed her into the trunk of their car and
drove her to a remote place, the flashes back to an earlier scene, to the
controversy at home, to an attempt to escape, and later, to her life as a child.
The message isn’t just powerful but artful - a cross between a Quentin Tarantino
film and a cutting-edge R&B video on MTV.

“The video is not based on
a specific incident or crime, but meant to describe the phenomena. But it’s
based on true stories that we’ve been hearing for years, some of them happening
to people we know,” said Tamer Nafar, one of the three musicians for DAM, which
stands for Da Arabians MCs. “From January to August, eleven women were killed in
the West Bank alone. This is very dangerous. It means our society is
deteriorating, and that it’s a society that allows people to kill each other,"
he said at the main launch event in Ramallah, attended by Bir Zeit University
students.

The project, which got underway more then two years ago,
brought the performers closer to the issue. As part of their involvement, they
visited shelters housing women in danger of being murdered by family
members.

The death that hit Turkus hardest was the story of a 26-year-old
woman living in Kafr Yasif, Turkus’ hometown. The woman, Nisreen Musrati, was
shot in the forehead one morning in March after she’d taken her young children
to school. The woman had been trying to escape her family, who lived elsewhere
in the country, for five years, Turkus says.

“She was extremely
beautiful, and there were always a lot of young men following her around. She
knew she was going to be killed one day,” Murkus said. “For me, the video is a
very important step. I’m ashamed that we have this way of treatment towards
women – a full half of society.” Murkus added that the phenomenon of honor
killings was not limited to the Arab world, and is an outgrowth of general
violence against women. “Even Israeli society there are a lot of incidents like
this, and I think it comes as a result of exposure to violence overall. Just
last week an Israeli policeman killed his wife,” she said, referring to a fatal
October 29 shooting of a woman in Bat Yam.

Suhell Nafer – Tamer’s brother
and the co-director of the video - noted that while many blame the political
situation for the slow improvements in women’s rights, this in itself is not
enough.

“Everyone wants to blame the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli
occupation, the siege. It’s easy to drop the fault on other people,” he said.
“But actually, I think it’s all our faults. When you say something is an honor
killing, you’re at fault, too. We need to throw these two terms out of our
vocabulary, and you just shouldn’t be allowed to say them in juxtaposition to
one another.” He said that the group hoped to circulate the video on the
internet and social networking sites, but also by trying to get it seen by young
people in schools and universities. “It’s a good brainwash, is what I would call
it.”

Crimes of honor, as they’ve generally become known, were once a
subject no one talked about publicly. In the last 20 years, however, the issue
has come under scrutiny by the media and NGOs, which have increased public
awareness of the problem. In the late 1990s, Rana Husseini, a Jordanian
journalist with The Jordan Times, began regularly reporting on the issue –
tracking down every report of an unexplained death of a woman or a reported
suicide – often learning that these were in fact honor killings. Her
award-winning work brought international attention to the issue and put pressure
on governments to crack down on the phenomena.

However, punishments for
men who kill a female relative to defend his honor are still considered
exceedingly light. In the West Bank, where Palestinian laws are based on the
Jordanian system, and in Gaza, based on Egyptian law, few people are prosecuted
for so-called honor crimes. When they are, the fact that honor was involved is
treated by judges as a mitigating circumstance. The UN estimates that about
5,000 women and girls are murdered and abused each year by male relatives as
punishment for a range of behaviors judged to have damaged the family
reputation.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas agreed in 2010 to increase penalties,
said Soraida Hussein of the Al Muntada Forum, which works to combat violence
against women. But the changes have not been implemented because the Palestinian
Legislative Council hasn’t been able to meet – in part due to the split between
Fatah and Hamas - and won’t do so until the next Palestinian elections, whenever
that may be.

“All of these political problems means women’s issues are
being held up. But Abbas could make a presidential decree,” Hussein added, “and
say that each life has equal weight, whether it’s a man or a woman’s. The law
doesn’t change culture, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

Some of
the images in the video are disturbing. And the lines of the song – “Without
shame, her brother puts his gun is his pocket” – are purposefully raw and
shocking.

“A huge part of our message is to be brave,” said Mahmoud
Jreri, the third member of DAM, the hip-hop group. “The people who are killing
their sisters won’t like it, because maybe they will see themselves in this
video clip.”

Sites Of Interest

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